Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very fact that Blackwater guards like the five being presently indicted for voluntary manslaughter are, along with the almost 200,000 other defense contractors currently employed in Iraq, technically outside Iraqi jurisdiction until Jan. 1 of next year, should start to provide answers to these questions. Unfettered by the chain of command and court-martial and outside the reach of the nascent Iraqi government, these mercenaries, specifically commissioned to provide security instead of standard U.S. armed forces, went about for years almost totally free of accountability. It’s almost surprising that the 2007 shootings and the few ugly...
...employment of Blackwater’s soldiers of fortune is problematic not only at those rare intervals when the contractors commit violent crimes against civilians, but always and inherently. As the architects of the war in Iraq maintained that they would respect the sovereignty of the elected Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki and insisted that economic motives could not be further from their minds, the massive army of legally immune private contractors that war effort came to require visibly undermined their every claim...
...bitter glee was the prevailing reaction in Baghdad to Monday's indictment in the U.S. of five Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 unarmed civilians at a busy intersection in the Iraqi capital last year. "It's about time they pay for their crimes," said Hosham Abdel Kader, a 53-year-old who was celebrating the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday with his family at a restaurant in the mainly-Shi'ite Karrada district. "I recoil, I freeze when I see those mercenaries on the street...
...weeks, though, Abdel Kader and others may feel differently. Under the terms of the recently approved bilateral U.S-Iraqi security pact (which takes effect on Jan. 1) the 30,000 or so private security contractors operating in Iraq will be stripped of legal immunity and become subject to Iraqi jurisdiction. The retraction of that get-out-of-jail-free card may prompt a change in the way these firms operate. "I think private security companies are toning it down now," said Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq. "The number of incidents of shooting that have occurred...
...Last year's shooting incident prompted greater U.S oversight of its outsourced warriors in the first operational theater to see the Pentagon rely so extensively on hired guns. The U.S government, its Iraqi counterpart and other groups have paid between $6 billion and $10 billion to private security contractors in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 through to 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office report published in August. And, as U.S troops draw down ahead of the planned complete withdrawal in 2010, the role of security contractors here may even expand...